Practices for the Refounding of God's People: The Missional Challenge of the West

By Alan J. Roxburgh and Martin Robinson

• Speaks to the bewilderment and helplessness many churches feel in the face of current events
• Practical new interpretation of changes in the West

Throughout its history, the church has faced crises of meaning and identity in all kinds of changing contexts. The crises facing the churches of the western hemisphere today are no different. At their best, churches have recognized that their challenge is not their own fixing or even “reformation” but a deep engagement with the ways the gospel transforms society. This book explores how this can happen again in a radically changing western world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Church Publishing
• Release date: May 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9780819233851

Alan J. Roxburgh

Alan J. Roxburgh is a leader of The Missional Network. He leads conferences, seminars, and consultations with denominations, congregations, and seminaries across North America, Asia, Europe, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Roxburgh consults with these groups in the areas of leadership for missional transformation and innovating missional change across denominational systems. He is the author of many books, including Joining God (Morehouse, 2015). He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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Introduction

This book addresses the nature of a missiological engagement with Western culture in all its paradoxical, conflicted complexity. What we call the West was formed out of Christian imagination. The modern West emerged from a trajectory that dispelled that imagination in what is called modernity’s wager,¹ which consists of the belief that all life can be lived well without the need for God’s agency. The practices and beliefs of the modern West were shaped by the conviction that the future lies in our own hands. Human agency became the primary driver of social, cultural, political, and economic life.

The West is like a child becoming independent of her parents. Imagine a parent teaching her daughter to ride a bike. At the beginning the parent reassures the daughter that she is (think—the Christian story) holding the bike solidly; she has no need to worry about falling and being hurt. For the daughter, it is a passage to adulthood, a step into maturity, a memory to look back on with the smiles of a grown-up. The parent’s goal is straightforward: provide security as her self-confidence grows. Gradually the parent takes her hands off as the daughter joyously rides down the road with no assistance. The modern West has taken a similar view of its Christian past. We’re all grown adults no longer in need of that kind of support. We’re mature agents in control of our own destiny. For those who need it, there’s still a religious tradition. God has not disappeared but become useful: a resource in our journey to independence. God, however, has nothing to do with the systems, structures, and operations of everyday life. Few foresaw this consequence as the modern West was forming out of its earlier Christian narrative, which is why Nietzsche has remained such a prescient voice. He declared that we killed God. For some, his language is too strong to accept. What we can say is that the West has transformed the God of the Christian tradition into a merely useful support or addendum to human action. God is still here, cheering in the stadium as we push ahead with our agendas.

We argue, in this book, that modernity’s wager has been far more corrosive to human thriving than any of its architects would have imagined. All of us in the West are part of the unraveling of this wager. Further, we propose that this unraveling is only part of the story. There is another story forming within the unraveling. It is about a ferment and bubbling happening across the West within which God is continuing to make all things new. The missiological challenge before the churches is to embrace this ferment in the confidence that God is the primary agent in the sea-change that is remaking the West. God is present in this disorienting change. Lesslie Newbigin asked, Can the West be converted? The response is yes, but make no mistake: the missiological challenge is not to focus on fixing or reforming the churches but to participate with the Spirit in the refounding of an unmoored society.

The West and its Euro-tribal churches have entered a time of unraveling that questions the nature of Christian identity and the meaning of the West. This is more than a description of historical fact or a nostalgic longing for what once was. Far more is at stake. With the loss of the Christian narrative and the ascendance of modernity’s wager, the West has lost its way to the extent that many of its citizens feel unmoored and cast adrift. Modernity’s promises have lost their power to deliver. Questions of a missiological engagement with the West are not parochial; they are not primarily about the churches and their survival. The questions are about Christian vocation in the restoration and healing of all creation. This is the core vocational challenge confronting Christians. Larry Siedentop, Faculty Lecturer in Political Thought at Oxford, questions:

Does it still make sense to talk about the West? People who live in nations once described as part of Christendom—what many would now call the post-Christian world—seem to have lost their moral bearings. We no longer have a persuasive story to tell ourselves about our origins and development.²

Niall Ferguson states it in these terms:

I really got to the point about the first decade of the twenty-first century, just as it was drawing to a close: that we are living through the end of 500 years of Western ascendancy.³

Paul Weston, in reflecting on the intellectual work of Lesslie Newbigin comments:

When Lesslie Newbigin returned from India in 1974 after 36 years of missionary experience, he was struck by what he came to describe as the disappearance of hope in the culture of the West. Always the missionary, Newbigin’s quest to find out what had happened to produce such an effect propelled him into a program of study and reflection. As he would later describe it, this process led him to the judgement that the culture of the West was the most challenging missionary frontier of our time.⁴

This book is not about how Christians might contribute to restoring the West. Our concern is about how God is calling the churches to participate in the healing of the world. In the West, too many of the children of modernity live without a narrative core that provides hope or direction. A widespread malaise, a disappearance of hope, has only deepened since Newbigin wrote. This book addresses ideas that might reorder Christian life in response to this challenge. The churches have little to say to the late modern culture of the West. They are little more than clubs where people gather for forms of personal reinforcement and are profoundly disconnected from the massive challenges of our culture. Christians in the West can discover ways to act in the conviction that God is the primary agent; only from this vantage point can we join God in the restoration of life in the West.

Throughout its history, the Church has faced crises of meaning and identity in all kinds of contexts. In the early 1950s, Newbigin presented the Kerr Lectures at Trinity College, Glasgow. In that time just after the end of World War II, there was a stark realization among Christian leaders that churches in the West had finally lost their identity as meaningful participants in the shaping of Western societies. They had become loosely compacted fellowships providing only a minimal, even token, part of the life of their members. They were mostly clubs with little to no effect on the wider society. Not much has changed. This loss of capacity for churches to influence and shape the lives of people in the West has, in fact, become more exacerbated. The societies of the West see churches as largely irrelevant to their search for a way out of the multiplying crises of Western life. Newbigin wrote of the need for Christian communities to be shaped around an eschatological and missionary imagination. The identity of churches cannot be formed around notions of religious clubs—even very useful clubs—but from the perspective of God’s actions in the remaking of the world and the healing of life (eschatological). Such an orientation means that the Church’s fundamental character is a community participating in the mission of God.⁵ Newbigin’s response to the crisis of the churches in the West remains before us. Augustine framed his great City of God in a similar situation. Benedict formed his order in another such context. Crisis is the soil in which God’s healing, redemptive future flourishes through Christian life. The crises before the West are overwhelming. Christian vocation as a missionary people must be reframed for this context. At their best, churches have recognized their vocation is not fixing themselves or even calling for some kind of new reformation, but rather, joining with God in the transformation and refounding of society in the name of Christ. The distinction is key because reformation remains focused on the church, whereas refounding is focused on the missionary vocation of the church. This book explores how this vocation can be engaged in the West unfolding before us.

The dominance of those churches formed out of the European and English reformations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is over. The churches that sprung from this five-hundred-year era in Western history became the dominant form of Christianity around the globe. That dominance lasted up to the end of World War I. These Euro-tribal churches now spread around the globe are in deep decline, especially in the places where they were formed—Europe and North America. They have lost their way. Turned in on themselves and the question of their own survival, they have become almost totally ecclesiocentric, preoccupied with trying to fix their structures and institutions in order to regain their place in Western societies. The result has been a profound loss of confidence that the God made known to us in Jesus Christ is the active agent in the world. There is a loss of confidence that God is out ahead, active in ordinary places in a dramatically changing West. These churches have failed to see this because they have been focused on fixing themselves.

In the midst of these realities, God is still up to what God has always been up to: the transformation, refounding, and reweaving of life across creation. The Church is continually being invited by the Spirit to join with God in this vast mission as a sign, witness, instrument, and foretaste of what God is doing for the whole of creation. The unraveling of these Euro-tribal churches has not been primarily a result of sociocultural factors (demographics, secularity, etc.) or economic, political, or ideological transformations in a networked, globalized world. While these are contributing factors, they are not the primary theological reason for the malaise of these churches and their vocation. In our view, it is the Spirit who is unraveling these Euro-tribal churches. We believe the Spirit is doing this so that they might come to their senses and embrace this gospel call to join with God in the refounding, the reweaving, the remaking of social life in an emerging West. The call and vocation of Euro-tribal churches has been lost in their anxieties around displacement and their obsession with trying to fix themselves and their institutions. It is time to heed the Spirit and go on a different journey out ahead where God is already at work.

This book addresses the questions of how Euro-tribal churches might engage the trajectory of the West inside modernity’s wager in order to embrace the vocation to which God is calling them. For this to happen, these churches need an imagination that will move them away from agendas to fix the churches toward one of joining God in the transformation of the postsecular societies of the West.⁶ It is only from within this engagement that we will discern the practices for being God’s people and, therefore, the shape of our churches.

There are many ways of framing the malaise preoccupying both these churches and the modern West. The English sociologist Elaine Graham describes our situation as one of simultaneous religious decline, mutation and resurgence.⁷ A massive de-institutionalization of religious life is occurring across almost all the Protestant denominations that are the heirs of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century reformations. Euro-tribal churches were transported to the new worlds through conquest, commerce, migration, and mission endeavors over the last five hundred years. Historian Susan Schreiner describes a situation where we are experiencing

"the inevitable response to the growing inability of an inherited culture to invest experience with meaning . . . like early modernity, we, too, are consumed with the breakdown of traditionally certain beliefs. Like the early modern era, our own time is . . . a time of great unmooring." . . . Every aspect of our culture reveals this anxiety that truth and reality are ephemeral. . . . The result is . . . a sense of vertigo and weariness.⁸

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman characterizes the current situation of the West not just in terms of a liquid modernity but also as a state of crisis⁹ that is not a short-term challenge soon to be fixed by tinkering with existing systems. This unravelling is about a passage wherein we have lost confidence in the primary institutions of the modern West (the state, economics, religious organizations, or a host of taken-for-granted ways of life)—particularly their capacity to address the deeply unsettling issues confronting life in our time. From financial crisis to massive increases in unemployment, from the loss of a sense that middle-class life is sustainable to the increasing fears of terrorism and extremism, people feel ever more vulnerable. They do not see existing institutions offering hope or ways forward.

One of the hard challenges is that the generation that has shaped the leadership of the Euro-tribal churches were raised during the heydays of economic progress and social development in the optimistic times of the sixties, seventies, and eighties when any downturn (for example, the economy) would be followed by an upturn and continuing progress. Crises were temporary. Things would always, eventually, right themselves and get better. Bred into the collective psyche of these leaders has been this presumption of progress and the capacity of human agency to develop strategies and programs to address any challenge. These convictions have guided leaders of the Euro-tribal churches for a half century of deepening crises. Up until very recently, the leaders of these churches continued to believe that some adjustments and well-designed strategies would result in a return to the upward curve of growth for their churches. All that was needed was the right leader, or the right key, to get the right adjustment. This perception lies shattered before us. The wreckage is profound; the disorientation extreme. The defaults of trying to fix must be replaced by a willingness to refound the life of these churches to be, again, a sign, witness, and foretaste of God’s transformative kingdom.

The Euro-tribal churches have been living within a false consciousness for a long time. Collectively, their self-understanding and ways of engaging a changing West no longer have the capacity to explain or address the crises in ways that capture people’s imagination. The arena of economics offers an illustration of what has happened to the Euro-tribal churches. Over the last decade the global economy has been confronted with shock-waves of upheaval. In addressing these disruptions, states and economic leaders have been guided by what might be called a fix assumption. This default assumption is manifest in the ways states developed legislation to govern banks and regulate the manipulation of the money supply. It is demonstrated in the attempts to fix national economies through massive infusions of money in the hope that this would result in a return to an expanding job market. Behind these, and other actions, stands the presumption that judicious fixes to the system would return the economic life of citizens to some form of normalcy—a resumption of life before the fall. What is settling into our general consciousness is that the upheavals manifest in 2008–2009 were not amenable to established assumptions and are not going to be fixed with established strategies. There is no returning to some pre-2008 normalcy.

Even the language that once seemed to make so much sense—for example, economic ups-and-downs—now seems archaic, incapable of making sense of what has happened. Economists and political leaders in Western nations assumed that standard explanations for economic challenges (embodied in such terms as inflation, adjustment to globalization, recession, employment-unemployment projections from previous periods of downturn, or the application of financial stimuli and so forth) would move economies back onto the path of expansion. But this is not happening. In plain terms, the presumed metrics are no longer usable. The assumption that if one can make adjustments using established metrics there will be a return to normal is dead. Economists are confounded with what is happening to the economies of nation-states and global markets. No matter how many buttons get pressed or levers moved, little changes a continuing malaise around a jobless economy, a constricting middle class, and an increasing sense of insecurity across the citizenries of the West. As this new, unanticipated reality sets in, there is a deepening fear that something has gone terribly wrong and that, whatever it is, it can’t be fixed with established formulas or metrics. One can sense the panic rising in people. Citizens across Western nations are losing confidence in their political and economic establishments. The United States has become a polarized nation driven, to a large extent, by this underlying sense that the economic and political world that had given people confidence and stability has gone and that political leadership has no idea what to do.

This is also the story of the Euro-tribal churches. A fear has settled in among the people and leaders of these churches that one more attempt at renewal or restructure isn’t going to get everything started again. When leaders feel this panic, their tendency is to work even harder at finding another fix, discovering one more new adjectival modifier to put in front of the word church (simple, natural, fresh, missional, and on and on and on) as if that will address what’s happening. These churches are in a new land, a different kind of West from the one in which they were founded and flourished. The challenge can no longer be defined in terms of renewal or restructuring. But the loss of legitimacy across growing sectors of Western life (political, religious, economic) is sending leaders in a desperate search for strategies to fix and renew their systems.

This book argues that God is the primary active agent in the midst of all this and that God up to something different. The Spirit is inviting these once established churches to join with God in the remaking of Western societies, not in fixing themselves. The refounding vocation of this moment is to leave behind an ecclesiocentric imagination and embrace a missiological call to join with God, who is already out ahead seeking to form doxological communities of life and hope. This is not a new call. It has given purpose to God’s people across the centuries. Its strangeness to us is testimony to our ecclesiocentric captivity. Growing numbers of Christians on both sides of the Atlantic sense the rightness of this description. They wrestle, however, with the question of what to do, of how to act. Over and over when we meet with church leaders, the fundamental question is How? How do we go about such a process of refounding? Hundreds of thousands are leaving their churches, tired of all the fix solutions.¹⁰ They’ve come to the end of a well-worn road and have little interest in the vision statements of denominations or the latest metrics for making the church work again. They are fed up with churches talking about themselves in world facing such massive challenges.

What Are the Ways Forward?

How can the Euro-tribal churches be refounded? Catholic philosopher Louis Dupre describes our time as a passage.¹¹ We are in an unpredictable passage from one time to another. For the Euro-tribal churches, this passage must no longer be characterized by its own turning inward to describe itself with terms such as loss or exile. These metaphors of grief and loss are understandable, but they can only misdirect us in discerning the actions that need to be taken. Metaphors of loss and exile tend to focus on the inner feelings and experiences of those in the churches who feel that their world has been taken from them by forces they can’t name. The terms postmodern, secularization, liberal, fundamentalist explain little except the sense of unmooring and disorientation. Such language tends to keeps us captive in our ecclesiocentrism—it’s about our loss and what’s happening to our churches.

The metaphors of journey and passage are far richer and evocative. They suggest invitation, discovery, discernment, and experimenting. They invite us to see that the location of hope is out on a road; it is neither predictable nor within our means to control. It is, however, in exactly this kind of place where we will see the work God has for us. Passage and journey are not about inner feelings. They are about actions: the decision and choice to go in a particular direction, to embrace a vocation that takes us beyond fixing. We live, to borrow George Steiner’s memorable phrase, in the "age of the afterward."¹² It’s the time after where we can’t go back to what was. We are in the time after the domain of the Euro-tribal churches (of whatever color or shade, whether left or right, liberal or conservative, new evangelical or neoliberal). This is the time of the afterward in which nostalgia, yearning for a past or even the need to grieve is not the call of God, but rather a siren song that leads inexorably to death. Like Ulysses of old, church leaders need to tie themselves to the mast of God’s future in order to resist the inexorable temptation of the sirens calling us back to ecclesiocentric fixes and the sad songs of false imagination around exile. The time of afterward requires different metaphors, an alternative imagination. Such imagination and metaphor were present in the ancient father and mother of our faith, Abram and Sarai. Here is the story of a worn-out, dried-up, dung-heap ancient couple, offering no hope or future. It is a picture that describes the Euro-tribal churches. From every reasonable perspective, Abram and Sara were finished. But God wasn’t ready to leave them in grief, or allow them to feel that somehow they had been exiled. On the contrary, God called these ancient, finished old people onto a journey away from their self-oriented perception of the situation into a passage, a journey, to a place unnamed. They went in the confidence that the One who called was to be trusted. Metaphors of exile and loss pale compared to this couple, as described in the words of Hebrews:

By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed by going out to a place which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing where he was going. (11:8, NASB)

For some this imagination will miss the essential need of getting the church right: assuring that people truly understand its essence and nature in order to be the right kind of church in our time. If such an approach were to have worked, it would have already done so. Getting the right understanding of what Jesus meant by the kingdom of God or developing a new confession about the great ends of the church¹³ sound like the right things to do, but we have now lived through decades and decades of this continual urging to get our thinking right and it